I once lived in a grand old house in Santa Ana. It had been divided into many rooms for rent, and rent it did. The house was located on a large lot, with a garage/barn/crashpad in the back corner of the lot. The manager was a Romanian who consisted of two entirely separate individuals, one sober - one drunk. Both were interesting individuals, but one was more dangerous - which was which i can no longer remember. I spent an unnatural amount of time clearing the refuse from the crashpad, believing as i still do there is a studio somewhere for me to work; all that my effort accomplished was getting my right angle grinder stolen from the basement. Among the tenants was a former boxer - once a heavyweight contender - then a massive black man who would cook rotting meat in the kitchen that was located directly below my room. He would then drive off in his still handsome Barracuda to his sheet rock job using his last force to his best advantage. Directly across the hall from my room was a former marine Master Sargent who for some reason allowed my spontaneous visits, where no one else would approach due to his surly manner. They were tempestuous times for me with much change, but none as vivid as the short period between when he asked me to buy him a six pack of beer and pint of Bourbon. It couldn’t have been two weeks later when i opened my door one morning to find him being escorted down the stairs with a paramedic on either arm. There was a long discolored “V” covering his lower extremities; its apex just below his belt, widening out over his two grotesquely swollen ankles. He was dripping shit all the way down the stairs, and died in an unknown hospital a week later. Many decades later i spent an afternoon alone with my invalid stepfather after his colostomy bag had burst. This man was an urbane, cultured son of a concert violinist who spent his working life terrorizing those with less business acumen, retiring as the CEO of one of the largest insurance brokerage companies in the country. Yet his grace couldn’t be known by many unless they had sat with him unable to articulate how to change his own shit bag, covered in his own excrement; our conversation was warm and boundless speaking of any and all things which might allay the odor and cruelty of being stuck. It was not long after this afternoon that he was able to pass quietly into the void. While such unsavory images might certainly run counter to the hilarity of our current existential straits; we are facing a nearly certain extinction succored with desperate entertainment, gorged on googahs guaranteed to fulfill our existence, if only we would buy them.
Some weeks back i was allowed to help a young woman pushing an old woman in a wheel chair up steps next to where i live. Later the old woman could be glimpsed sitting patiently in the entryway waiting for what my mind could not fully face - her death. She is now dead and the family is processing its grief, as all will, and have been doing so for as long as we have existed as a species. How much different are any of us from this woman sitting in the entryway awaiting her end¿ I have an old friend who when i was young gifted me with an “eschatological laundry list,” much of which remains tattooed to the inside of my skull; may you all have such friends. One line item of that list reads, “We are all already dying and we will be dead for a long time.” It is hard to know of the impact of such reality so simply stated can have on a young mind, but i feel particularly fortunate to have been able to chew on it for the past 4 decades; seems barely time enough to comprehend. I have recently taken a pet - a Beta fish - a breed itself that is fraught with meaning for me; like all helpful meaning mostly fathomed in the context of your current experience. So, each morning when i wake and parcel out food to the fish, i expect the little bugger to be dead - why is that? It could be that based on expediency when i clean the bowl i simply pour the old water out into the trees while “Tiburon” is still in the bowl; is that heartless? My reasoning is the physical perturbation of scooping him/her into a container so as to scour what will be dirty in hours balanced against the momentary rush of water from his/her habitat is a fair call. Certainly i remove his/her plants so as to not get entangled in the process, as well as her/his rock furniture - but still each morning i expect the little bugger to be belly up. The question is whether s/he is dying, or i. Clearly we both are, i know i have been for a long time. For certain, the brash young turk who would brave a frontal assault on the shut closed door of a sober curmudgeon Master Sargent has long since succumbed to consideration and vain attempts toward compassion. Yet again there is that fucking paradox; was my act of bringing booze to a man that close to death a self-serving design for companionship at a lonely place in my life, or a growing ear to the wants of others free of judgement? i don’t know. I’m pretty sure i knew everything at that time, even though i had not yet received the wisdom of the “Eschatological Laundry List.” Thank the stars above, i now know much less and growing more so daily.
Does this mean my current narrow concept of living and dying could radically change over the next decades, or few seconds depending upon one’s relative optimism? Having survived substantial physical calamity, i am a faithful believer in the body’s ability to mend itself. Does this mean that dying could be conceived as just one more of our weird realm’s maladies to be cured by medicine, philosophy or religion? Our uncertainty about this life passage has certainly been enough to justify wars of unimaginable carnage, were it not for the testimony of widows and orphans, or the egregious and exceedingly traceable profit of the most unscrupulous amongst us. Profit enough to destroy the planet - who’d have thought something as wholesome as self-interest could devolve into such a demonic delusion that it is possible to control an entire planet, and yet here we sit choking in our own plastic vomit while the barons of fossil fuel increase the production of single-use plastic bottles and containers with nary a peep from our “leaders.” Leadership, i fear is not only dying, but has long since been dead. A rather cruel taunt to any in the upper crust - which by any measure of introspection describes my own unmet needs masked as self righteous muckraking. That paradox again, whether it is sanctimonious projection or a voice crying in the wilderness does not make my commentary less useful to our collective survival. Dying seems to be some sort of passage forced on our organism to insure a vital root, one capable of transforming and thriving in what had once been a paradise, but now a lot of tree stumps and effluence from an extractive corporate blindspot gutting our ability to regenerate, not only the planet but our own souls. The chief scientist at googol is chomping at the bit (no pun intended) to upload digital data into the human mind, and i fear reverse the process for whatever nefarious reasons i can only imagine, but a vivid memory of Christopher Walken yanking his drooling son from the headset in “Brainstorming” is a good place to start. The diseased part of my makeup, suspects the computer models of our future have long since forecasted our certain doom. The hidden treasures of the ruling class/War Profiteers are now being thrown into any technology that can accommodate the hubris of those who would not only condemn all of humanity by arrogant recklessness, but somehow believe such power should be immortalized either as the Nazi wannabe - Walt Disney tried - cryogenics, or by the long ago forecasted shift from a carbon-based life form to that of a silicon-based life force.
Talk about your reaction-formation to the dread of death, but what i don’t get is how they plan to account for feeling in their vainglorious headlong pursuit of digital immortality at the expense of an entire species¿ What grates on my last nerve, however is how the nature of such an upload will only reflect the pencil-neck geek’s concept of humanity. No one will know the despair of my friend the Master Sargent contemplating death by bottle. That has to have been one of the most complex of contradictions - a man whose life was devoted to feats of bravery and the training of warriorship to fall on his own sword alone and unmourned save the morbid curiosity of a neighbor man-child entirely absorbed in the mythical bubble of a creative “future” - a bubble that was dying even then. More Paradox - how can a creative bubble die - an inchoate dynamic constrained by no more than the flimsiest of membranes in a molten universe that seems itself slated to slip back into the event horizon. I can attest my bubble was very real at the time, and remains to some degree intact; though now i march toward my raft on the river Styx crushed by my own ambition, rather than exalted and successful toward glimmering heights of fame. Will computers ever know more than an emulated (popular computer conceit) hope or crushed dream. It is here i part company with the wizards of intellect planning our immortal escape using some Rube Goldberg contraption emulating the human experience - without feeling of any kind. That absence of affect to me is just plain stupid. The closest our computer compatriots will ever achieve is a decaying power source gating smaller and smaller +/- 5v pulses until all that is left is an inert dielectric substrate - yes dearies, our computers are all dying, just like us - “Da’ Nile is more than a river in Egypt” - A. Nonymous. What if dying is more than the cessation of life¿ What if our quest for immortality that is being driven by the unknown nature of the beyond is also sapping the dynamic of living from our souls¿ Were we to accept the unknown nature of death as an instrument of our higher learning rather than an impediment to our vulgar conceits of possession and power, might we just find a measure of peace on earth? I have no clue, but i am the son of a woman who had confided a childhood “inconsolable” fear of death. Today she does not seem quite so afraid, but then she is also a pretty savvy spirit. I grieve still for the loss of my much older friend who shared with me the old indigenous adage “When you are born, you are crying and everyone around you is laughing, when you die all around you are crying and you are laughing.”
My father was an indomitable man who sauntered through ridicule and abandonment with a keen curiosity and lively intellect. Even as he lay dying, he managed to set his own thigh knuckle and take 22 steps. But will is not enough to preclude the inevitable end of breath, anymore than a religious thralldom will stave off your own last breath. What happens after that is in someways akin to what other people think of you - none of your business. I am not sanguine about the future of our species when some of the brightest minds on the planet have absorbed their creative lives into the creation of an Artificial Intelligence devoid of feeling - after some reading - a not entirely accurate assertion. However, in so far as we cannot explain how after eons of evolution we can and do still take our power and use it to end the life of another does not bode well for those pondering the state of personhood for digital beings, anymore than it does for the child who has watched its family vaporized for no more than the greed of a “leader.” We as a species have not even answered the simple question of why are we here, how can we assume the responsibility of imbuing digital technology with purpose. Until we can better explain how aggression, greed, fear, love, courage are useful or needless within our species and to then take steps together to protect our fragile ecosphere and even more fragile human relationships from self-serving and tired traditions we are deluding ourselves from accepting the ultimate reality, there is no constant but change. We will have to find ways to embrace change rather than cling to each proffered fiction designed to impoverish our wherewithal and to enslave our willingness to feel the tenderest of love with all we meet. Those who deny this logic are the same misguided spirits who will not allow Huckleberry Finn to be read in a school, while providing weapons and ammunition to others who would slaughter in that same school. Our time is nigh, and as close to an immortal as i’ve known once said “he who is not busy being born is busy dying” - Bob Dylan - good luck to us all.
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living - the sonnet
eating ice cream pop asked “Are we living?”
he is no longer living; i still am.
Yet you didn’t know him before as being,
now you do, if just from his son the ham.
there has to be more to life than ice cream
don’t know what - something is sure to turn up.
I try to stay away from things that scream.
without which no playing with a yelping pup?
Don’t tell me my life is a paradox.
I might have guessed, if i were i wiser.
But wise, i might have returned as an ox,
not some damn fool dressed as a wanderer
Descartes had said “Cogito ergo sum”
I wish he’d said, “i think, therefore - drink rum”
jts 02/19/2018
http://stoneartist.com
reprinted with permission - all rights reserved
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